Backronym

Because I have not yet mastered Facebook or Twitter, it is not surprising that I do not keep up on all of the latest trends, gossip, and hipster dialect. I tend to live in the past -- If I learned that Jack Benny was indeed the Secretary of the Treasury, I would simply shrug and accept it.

Though I hear the term rather frequently, I honestly have no idea what a kardasian is (though I would guess it's some sort of Israeli firearm.) And while I do know that Justin Bieber is supposedly this generation's version of Paul McCartney, I haven't the foggiest idea which of the Olsen twins he sleeps with, or whether or not he passionately hates the Red Sox like all good Americans do.

Even so, I generally expect myself to have a reasonable grasp of non-social-media terminology. Therefore, I was surprised when I ran across a perfectly cromulent word I had not heard before. The meaning was obvious in a way that seems rare...but when I heard "backronym," I knew precisely what it was. And I thought, "what a great word!"

I've used many backronyms throughout my career, and have probably even invented one or two. Heck, we have all done it at one time or another -- invented a sequence of words to represent an existing word that fits our naming needs. If there weren't already other teams who had done it, we could call our Masters team "Foothills Aquatics Swim Team" so we could be FAST.

Or Fiercely Intimidating Submersible Humans.

Well, OK...sometimes people try a little too hard to shoehorn words into a backronym. But the concept itself is legit.

Acronyms and abbreviations can make life easier, but some professions take it to the extreme. Once, after having a conversation that was more than 50% shortcuts, one of my Martin Marietta colleagues asked me how many acronyms and abbreviations I knew. I figured I might know a few hundred...but when I started making a list (purely from memory), I realized that my estimate was WAY low. I probably know thousands.

And now with "LOL' and its brethren entering the lexicon, I'm guessing that ALL of us know a bazillion forms of brevity. I am tempted to grab my English teacher soapbox and preach about the value of linguistic purity...but in reality, I guess I'm OK with the practice. I mean, what evil megalomaniac would want to have to describe their weapon as "Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation"?

Anyway, I will end this discussion with a small bit of trivia. The boxy truck thing in the photo above is the Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV), which was a project that Martin Marietta was involved in during the 1980s. I briefly helped with some of the documentation, and thought it was a pretty cool gadget. Sure, it was slow and clunky...but it turned out to be one of the grandparents of the Google self-driving car (as well as the Roomba and the Mars rovers, etc), and as such, deserves our acclaim and gratitude. Even if it didn't have a cool backronymish name.

That's all I have to say for now. Thanks for dropping by, and have a great day!